Baseball-sized hail!? Did it have no effect outside of the solar farm? Does everyone in Nebraska park indoors? Was nobody caught put in the street? Are the houses made of stone?
And Nebraska is mostly empty so much falls on nothing.
Roof insurance pays out and crews come from as far away as Arizona to feast and the cycle continues.
These big hailstorms seem to be once in ten years or so.
When they're green, you know there is hail and perhaps even a tornado inside somewhere. Beautiful but terrifying all at the same time.
Hail. Rocks. Planks. Cows...
At even modest cycling speeds, dust, sand, insects, rocks, small children, etc., may irritate or injure eyes. Eyewear is strongly recommended.
At highway speeds (~100 kph) your eyes will tend to tear up.
With goggles, motorcyclists, race-car drivers, and pilots sustain wind speeds of ~200--300 kph, though that is probably an upper reasonable limit, and again, any sort of debris will greatly increase trauma.
(Some) pilots have survived supersonic bailouts or loss of structural integrity: <http://www.classichistory.net/archives/sr-71-breakup>. Though typically, that ride starts with a full flight suit and helmet, though it needn't end in the same state.
Yes the hail too is big in Texas.
Even withing the areas where hail falls, most of it won't be the giant hailstones. Once it gets below the size of a quarter cars and roofs are generally safe.
But yes, it regularly totals cars and destroys roofs. They'll send out an army of adjusters and roofers will swarm the area looking for work.
Don't be an insurance company specializing in just one city in Texas or you can be wiped out in one storm.
It’s absolutely mind blowing to me how many people have their garage packed with “stuff and junk” and park outside. And then they end up strapping mattresses on their cars with duct tape.
I really want solar panels but it just doesn’t seem to make sense here. This is the 2nd time we’re having roof replaced in 10 years. A few houses have panels on their roofs and about 30% panels seem to have damage visible from the street.
I assume this would be standard practice (diversify across regions and types of insurance) for any insurance provider, right?
It's a bit easier in Texas with multiple large cities. But if your marketing and sales take off in one region, you can find yourself vulnerable to a single hurricane hitting the coast, for instance.
Since insurance is so heavily state regulated, if you are limited to your one state that has one big city, you may have that risk no matter what. Bigger companies can span multiple states, of course. Smaller companies will have to have their portfolio underwritten by another insurance company.
Lloyds of London is a marketplace where a lot of insurance companies reinsure with each other, or with "syndicates" which are groups of investors.
Other damage would likely have been limited to a few vehicles and structures (not many as those would not be densely clustered), and probably a fair bit of crop damage. Both within a reasonably small radius relative to the solar farm.
The solar array was most likely the most valuable property in the region. It's what happened to be in the bullseye of the storm, so to speak.